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Featured: Millet in E Africa

Lieven Claessens resolves the Great Millet Mystery:

In GYGA we use HarvestChoice’s SPAM crop distribution masks for our analysis. SPAM in turn uses FAO statistics to create spatially disaggregated maps of crop distribution. I looked in more detail to the FAOstat numbers and found out that their numbers for ‘millet’ are actually for all sorts of millets combined… So finger and pearl millet are combined, even with teff to my big surprise! Identity crisis? ;-) In GYGA we have used a generic model for both pearl and finger millet so they are combined in the analysis….

Bottom line: the GYGA results for “millet” are unusable. But it’s FAO’s fault.

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Another use for taro leaves

This is a new one on me. Hanging out on Instagram, I came across this photo by Bea Misa Crisostomo, self-confessed “plant bore.”

Anishi– fermented gabi (taro leaves) from India. With finger marks

A photo posted by Bea Misa Crisostomo (@beatbeatrice) on

Had never heard of fermented taro leaves made into a patty like this. Apparently “anishi” is a Nagaland delicacy, and can be made from yam leaves too. Incidentally, “gabi” seems to be the word for taro in the Philippines, rather than India, where the word “aravi” is more commonly used. But there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that anishi is an Indian dish.

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Outstanding Papers in Plant Genetic Resources 2014

…early this month the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) has selected the paper ‘Improving Hierarchical Clustering of Genotypic Data via Principal Component Analysis’ for the 2014 award for ‘Outstanding Papers in Plant Genetic Resources’.

The paper is the result of a collaboration between Biometris and the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands (CGN): “The result of these two worlds meeting is influential science and efficiently managed germplasm.” Congratulations to Thomas Odong and his co-authors.

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Lots of old book illustrations now online

A Yahoo research fellow at Georgetown University, Kalev Leetaru, extracted over 14 million images from 2 million Internet Archive public domain eBooks that span over 500 years of content. Because we have OCR’d the books, we have now been able to attach about 500 words before and after each image. This means you can now see, click and read about each image in the collection. Think full-text search of images!

Very cool. Interested in sheep breeds, say? Go crazy.

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